Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday February 16, 2010 @04:24PM
from the life-after-alfresco dept.

A week after the announcement that open source advocate and blogger Matt Asay is leaving Alfresco for Canonical, in the role of COO, Matt has agreed to answer your questions about his role at Canonical, his vision for the future of Ubuntu, or the prospects for open source as we begin to emerge from recession. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. (Disclaimer: Matt is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet.)

Are these stories at all positive for the project? I mean, you would think with states and governments using Ubuntu or Red Hat that it would catch on like wildfire if the savings are there so why isn't that happening? I know Microsoft sends out a lot of Wormtongues to stick in the ears of important people, do you plan on targeting governments in a similar manner? Does/will Canonical work on making a presence in things like the EU Commissions where we've seen corporations collecting members in their pockets?

Porting a game is an enormous undertaking. Writing a game to be cross-platform from the get-go by using openGL might be an option but video drivers aren't the only problem, Linux has big problems regarding consistent audio frameworks across all distributions. Games work well under Windows because Windows is inherently monolithic whereas Linux is inherently modular. The monolithic nature of the Windows API cuts costs by guaranteeing that a game will work on every Windows machine (excepting odd circumstances

You can just say "Linux has big problems regarding audio". So many promised solutions (alsa, esound, jack, pulseaudio), and non of them works properly! Sometimes choice helps by creating alternatives (like postfix over sendmail), and sometimes it hinders by diluting resources - and the later certainly happened here.

What are the plans to induce game makers to port their games to linux?

By whom? For what purpose? You're implicitly invoking The Mysterious Them (the planners), but actual people and/or organizations of people need to do the footwork. Things inhibiting game developers targeting Linux include:

Too small of a market. The market must be sized so as to support the development and QA effort required for the port. For a long time, Mac games would be brought over by a third-party porting shop working with the original publisher of what was usually a Windows-targeted game. This

Market fragmentation due to "Linux" not actually being a single targetable platform for gaming. A game dev shop could perhaps target one or two specific releases of specific distros, but that fragments the market further. See the previous item.

[snip]

Why not jump-start LSB again? Maybe change it to be more Debian-friendly, etc.

A lot of the time, they're hyped well beyond reality. Like how the Norwegian government was to use ODF. Yes, all public forms will be available in HTML, PDF or ODF but the many thousands of MS Office licences used internally did not change. Microsoft marketing would sometimes be proud to learn from the OSS community.

Every so often I see an adoption story about so and so taking up some open source solution and sometimes I think "Wow, French government? Now it's really going to take off. This is it. It's time." And then I wait. And wait.

This, I believe, is an opportunity for Canonical to tighten its focus. While Shuttleworth suggests that Silber's appointment "doesn't mark a change of direction," perhaps it should. With over 300 employees and products that span mobile, Netbooks and other personal computers, cloud computing, enterprise servers, and more, Canonical has its fingers in a lot of pots.

As COO, what are you going to do to improve the products you highlighted above? I'm not looking for a soft answer like "I'm going to promote Ubuntu on netbooks" but more so an itemized list of measurable goals, with milestones, dates and areas of focus (for instance, power minded ARM distributions). Is there anything about their vision you intend to change or influence the most?

I'm curious as to what efforts will be made to keeping frameworks like Mono, Java and WINE current in existing releases. It seems that by the time a release happens these frameworks are already several versions behind. It would be nice to have an "edge" set of repositories that keep up with this in addition to backports that is.

The frameworks aren't the only things behind. What about all of the people who think "Linux is broken" or "Linux doesn't support new hardware" because Ubuntu ships with old versions of ALSA and the kernel (so old video drivers)?

Have you ever used the unstable branch?I was playing around with some of the new KMS ati support, but Lucid still has way more problems them Karmic. I like to torture myself with the unstable branch(I may need help). I think old and tested is less "broken" than new and unstable.

The release cycle of Ubuntu is comparable to Windows. The current stable kernel is from September 2009. ALSA is from May 2009. If you want updated versions you can suffer with me using the unstable branch and have a few hickups that

Especially on LTS releases. For most non-geeks, a major upgrade every 6 months is too much. Going from LTS to LTS is more realistic. Right now, 8.04 is the current LTS and installing new software (e.g. gtkpod, songbird) is very difficult because it too often requires upgrades of major libraries. For an OS only 2 years old, that's not good.

Ubuntu's (and other Linux distros) heavy use of dynamic libraries are a major contributor to this problem. It would be great if Ubuntu could provide updates to librar

I'm guessing we should remove SAMBA and FAT support while we're at it. Hope you don't like to access those USB drives. Oh yeah, you shouldn't be using h.264, mpeg (of any kind) or a number of other container formats other than Ogg + Vorbis/Theora.

I'm guessing we should remove SAMBA and FAT support while we're at it. Hope you don't like to access those USB drives. Oh yeah, you shouldn't be using h.264, mpeg (of any kind) or a number of other container formats other than Ogg + Vorbis/Theora.

You're not honestly comparing apples to apples here. There are protocols and formats and codecs that aren't native to Linux true, but they are either relatively simple and feature complete or the standard is open though non-free. For example let's take H.264, both ffmpeg and x264 should be able to decode any valid H.264 stream. WINE and Mono on the other hand are trying to implement some of the core features in a vast platform, they're like constant hackjobs to bugfix and update in a neverending stream of things that don't work and each new thing comes as a "surprise".

Don't get me wrong, I've fiddled with WINE quite a lot and done git bisects to find regressions and it's extremely useful in doing things on Linux that otherwise plain wouldn't work, but I also see how much of it is stubs and hacks and unknowns that they duct tape together to make it mostly work. It's never going to get done, it'll always be a crutch to lean on never a real leg to stand on. I don't in any way think they should be removed, but I see them as very much less ideal than most of the things you mention.

You used to write a lot about desktop Linux distributions [cnet.com] but now that you're COO of Canonical, the revenue comes most from enterprise support. Do you plan on trying to change that or maintain any value in pleasing the at home Ubuntu user? Your blog post talks about your kids achieving basic tasks with Ubuntu, will you still keep them in mind despite the fact your new employer doesn't see a dime from them? Any plans to make it more user friendly or make it more mainstream and less server room [cnet.com]?

Now that Mark Shuttleworth has stepped aside, how long until the Microsoft coyotes come in and either implant a new CEO or insert stealth ex-employees into the fold to subvert Ubuntu or suddenly announce a new pact with Microsoft and Novell? How long can we expect Ubuntu to continue free of Redmond's grasp? Many won't speak of this, but you know the feelings are there. Just you wait, the "let's make a deal" Microsoft fairies will swarm in and around Ubuntu eventually.

As over watch of operations management, what kind of performance measurements are you going to make to decide which direction Ubuntu development is heading? Number of bugs? Just cash flow? Number of supported packages?

Simply put: what are you going to improve Canonical's operations and how are you plan on measuring it to prove you're making a difference?

I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?

More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE. We need to know exactly when Matt will be pushing for GNOME to be deprecated in favor of KDE (or even XFCE). He really doesn't have a choice; GNOME needs to go, and it needs to go very soon.

Even if it wasn't as great as everyone was expecting, at least KDE managed to get their 4.0 release out the door quickly, and have been making great improvements on it since then. We see them innovating, and creating a desktop environment that keeps getting better and better. Their underlying toolkit, Qt, keeps improving rapidly thanks to the efforts of Nokia and others.

GNOME, on the other hand, has been spinning its wheels for years. It has no real leadership, and we aren't seeing any innovation out of them. GTK+ is basically in maintenance mode.

We're seeing the GNOME community fragmenting, and quite badly. Some people still advocate using C, others are saying that Mono is the way to go. And yet others are pushing for Vala. Frankly, the internal strife will tear the GNOME project apart, much like happened to XFree86. I, for one, sure hope that Ubuntu has moved away from GNOME far before then.

I do think that Qt is a better framework to build upon, but I think there is room for the Gnome desktop.

They have different goals and philosophies. I think KDE 4.4 right now is a far more advanced desktop than Gnome 2.x, but the work on Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell shows that they do have an eye towards the future.

However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gno

However, given that even many diehard GTK developers seem to have serious issues with GTK, and there is some dissent over how to proceed with GTK 3 in the future, why not at least consider a future Gnome built upon Qt?

The problem is C vs C++. It pretty effectively rules out any real sharing of code bases and means that to write Gnome/Qt, you are pretty much starting from scratch. I think KDE just tried that and it was a long and nasty road. I don't think that many enough would embrace Qt/C++ to see it through and it'd never work quite the same, the danger is that you'd only get a bleak shadow of what Gnome should be and get all kinds of flamewars going.

I (honestly) agree with most things you're saying and I think Ubuntu should switch to KDE once they've gotten around to creating a nice UI with all that innovation and technology. So around version 5, I guess. Cause right now, with the combination of vanilla Gnome, (Gnome-)Do and Compiz I have never been happier with a windowing environment. It looks good and gets the fuck out of my way most of the time. OTOH in the office we use KDE4 and it looks horrible and plays much the same. Looking at my phone, one o

More importantly, we see GNOME falling further and further behind KDE.

I think it depends on your goals. I'm not surprised when a programmer says they like KDE because it's very flexible, but I think if I were setting up Linux for my mom, I'd use Gnome. It's simpler, and I think most people would find the UI conventions to be more clear. Maybe it's just me, but when I use KDE, I tend to feel like they're giving me 50 options that I don't care about and I can't find the 1 option I do care about. If I find it confusing *at all* then there'd be no hope for my parents.

I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?

Yep. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I use fluxbox on ubuntu rather than gnome. One of the big problems in karmic is that I'm being affected by multiple new regressions that seem to arise from the lack of any serious testing on any desktop environment other than gnome. Two examples: (1) Previously, sound used to work fine for me in fluxbox. Now, sound works sometimes in Gnome, never in fluxbox. (2) This [launchpad.net] bug appears to arise because they decided to implement a new signal from the Gnome desktop to let xsplash know when it was done starting up, but nobody appears to have bothered to check what would happen in desktop environments other than Gnome, which don't implement the signal.

I understand that Gnome is the primary desktop focus of the standard version of ubuntu. But is is really that much to ask that someone at least start up the other desktop environments once to see if they work? Both of the problems above were evident to me within five minutes of upgrading from jaunty to karmic.

I think Ubuntu is actively hurting the KDE community by giving it a bad name.

When Canonical works on new features for each Ubuntu release, they work indepdently of the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is constantly trying to play catch-up on base issues.

Even worse, they put out unstable, buggy, and sometimes flat-out broken KDE packages. Almost every I've talked to that has had really bad experiences with KDE complain about bugs and constant crashes they had when testing KDE packages from Ubuntu.

Read KDE forums, mailing lists, etc. You'll see some serious hate and vitrol from users who blame KDE devs, not realizing that the same packages on other distros work just fine. They don't realize it is their distro that is causing their problems.

I've seen several KDE devs walk away and stop contributing because of all the hate their getting. If Ubuntu wasn't putting out broken packages, it would remove a lot of this backlash.

That is not to say that 100% of KDE backlast is Ubuntu-created. Some people just don't like KDE 4.x. I didn't like the 4.0 release, and was pretty worried about the future direction of KDE at the time. But Ubuntu certainly hasn't done KDE any favors the past two years with the packages they've put out.

I have been using Ubuntu as a software developer for the past several years. I have been extremely disappointed with the most recent release of Ubuntu, 9.10, as it has been extremely buggy and seems like a step backwards to me. The conclusion of this review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-karmic-koala,2484-13.html [tomshardware.com] also expresses a lot of my thoughts about Ubuntu 9.10. I had so many problems in using 9.10, that did NOT exist in 9.04, that I switched one of the two computers I use at work to Windows 7, for stability (yes, these are crazy days). Do you have any plans to increase quality control in Ubuntu, even if it comes at the cost of delaying the every six month release schedule?

Quality control in Ubuntu seems like a huge problem. Every release fixes something broken and breaks something that was working. Wifi used to be broken and now it works. Power management used to work and now it's broken. It's a huge waste of time and it makes it hard to recommend Ubuntu.

I've been using Ubuntu exclusively on my home desktop for a few years now; I've never used another distro for more than a couple of days. So -- are Fedora and OpenSUSE seriously different from Ubuntu in fixing some stuff while breaking other stuff?

For instance, I've also had power management issues in various releases (at the moment it's mostly working), and I've always attributed it to the fact that, well, suspend and hibernate remain a bit flaky on Linux, mostly due to problematic devices/drivers. I assum

This is an excellent question. I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.

Another regression that affected me after the upgrade to karmic was this one [launchpad.net]. I noticed the problem, and because it was causing me significant inconvenience I dug around in the source code and found it. As described in the bug report, there is a function called temporary_hack_for_initial_fade(). So obviously someone put a kludge in and then the kludge wasn't fixed in time for the release of karmic, so they released it anyway. This doesn't seem to speak well for the quality assurance procedures that go into a release of ubuntu.

Shuttleworth is still funding Canonical. At some point however, this needs to turn into a protibable vendure to endure. How does Canonical create lasting revenue streams, and will those decisions come at the cost of usability and freedom in the distro, such as the recent decision to use Yahoo search (powered by Bing) as the default)?

Of course you can change it. And after you change it back to Google (or whatever), which takes all of one second, it ought to remain the default even after an upgrade. Some people just get really aggravated arguing that since most people use Google now, most people would prefer to use Google in the future, and thus the change to another search engine is not in most people's immediate best interest. Which is true, and if it weren't about such a triviality, I might agree with them.

Smartphones have become another computing device. There is Android, and there is MeeGoo. Ubuntu has missed the oportunity of creating a phone version of Ubuntu like Apple did with iPhone OS....what is Canonical going to do in this area? Create a phone version of Ubuntu and hope that some vendor chooses it? Support Android? Or Meego?

In the 21st century, why is it that we still don't have a simple, user-friendly tool to help both home and enterprise users to migrate their existing documents and settings while performing a Linux install?

I believe that Canonical is probably the most popular Linux distro that still has as it's primary goal helping make the world a better place. RedHat and Suse both make it difficult to fork their distros, by requiring that you remove their trademarks everywhere, and in general, they are unfriendly to forks. Ubuntu on the other hand, has been much friendlier in this regard, and there are several useful forks that make life better for their target users.

Does Ubuntu have any plans for trying to recruit business software makers to make Linux versions? Before Ubuntu can be useful to me, at the very least, there needs to be at least ONE functional financial package (ala: Quickbooks, Simply, etc.), for example.

1) Do you feel Kubuntu's 'Operation Timelord' is a step in the right direction for the distribution? If so, why do you feel it was allowed to slip far enough to warrant a complete overhaul?
2) Do you see Kubuntu & Xubuntu becoming purely community-supported distros with Canonical focusing solely on Ubuntu desktop & server?
3) With Xubuntu's memory & CPU requirements being on par with Ubuntu's and Mark Shuttleworth's invite 'to become a self-maintained project in the Ubuntu community' (according to lxde.org), does this signal an end to Xubuntu as a whole or at the very least the 'lightweight' *buntu distribution?

Sorry, I know my viewpoint is going to anger and annoy some people, but I've been thinking about the relative lack of success of Linux on the desktop lately. By "relative lack of success" I don't mean to bash the quality of Linux, but only that it doesn't seem to be very widely used in spite of being pretty good for a lot of purposes. So first, my obvious question would be, to what do you attribute the relative lack of success, and what plans do you have, if any, to do something about it.

To be a little more specific (and to answer my own question a little bit) it seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications. For example, lots of people have complained about GIMP for reasons ranging from lack of specific functionality to an unconventional UI, and even to the awkward connotations of the name "GIMP". Even having personally gotten some graphic designers to try the GIMP, I have yet to know any professional designers who find it adequate. I'd like to use Linux, but don't find I can come close replicating an equivalent workflow to what I have available using tools like Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, and Sound Forge. (those are the applications I'm personally stuck with, though I'm sure other people have other applications on their personal lists.)

Sorry if this is a vague or offensive question, but I'd really like to know, is there a plan to attack those kinds of issues at any point? I feel like Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) have done a pretty good job in polishing the installation procedures and the "look and feel" aspect of things, but does there come a time when you say, "We need a serious Adobe CS competitor for our OS to be competitive on the desktop, so let's make that happen"? If so, what happens then?

Sorry, I know people are going to tell me that I should just use the GIMP and if it doesn't do what I need, I should rewrite it. Sorry, I don't have the programming skills and and I don't have the money to single-handedly fund development of all the applications that I'd need to switch to Linux. I'd be willing to buy them once they were developed, or even make modest contributions to a project that I thought would actually deliver on what I needed, but I'm not a software developer.

Really, honestly, I'm not trying to be offensive to FOSS developers. I'm just speaking as someone who, for both practical and ideological reasons, would love to switch away from using Windows, but I keep finding that I can't. I use Debian and Ubuntu when I can, and have even contributed money to FOSS projects. So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux? If so, what's the plan? What can I do to help?

OpenOffice.org is getting quite good for most purposes lately, and that seems to be where the attention is focused. As for advanced image/sound/video/CAD editing applications, with a few partial exceptions here and there (eg. Blender), Wine seems to be the way to go. Wine is also moving forward pretty fast with Google pushing it as the means through which they release Linux versions of all their desktop software.

To be a little more specific (and to answer my own question a little bit) it seems to me that a fair amount of the problem isn't the OS itself, but the associate applications.

Clearly the larger the install base for an OS, the more applications are likely to be developed for it, but additionally the ease of developing, marketing, and getting those applications to the end user plays a big role. I know the current Canonical roadmap includes an App Store built into the package manager, to facilitate developers marketing and delivering applications to end users, similar to what Apple has done with the iPhone App Store. Ubuntu can also capitalize upon nonproifit collaborative developm

I know the current Canonical roadmap includes an App Store built into the package manager

Thanks for this bit of information. I use Ubuntu, but I'm largely ignorant about stuff like this.

This would mean either embracing WINE in a big way...

If they do that, they should be sure to develop WINE to the point of being transparent. If you lose features, experience bugs, have to figure out work-arounds, and have to hunt for files inside of foreign directory structures, then it's not going to be a good solution. Ideally, you even want applications to use native UI conventions. For cross-platform development done right, I think the best examples I'm aw

So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux?

Yes [launchpad.net]. The trouble is, if you frame it that way then Linux has to dislodge every incumbent market dominating piece of software which is well beyond the capability of Shuttleworth. I think it's actually beyond the capability of the whole open source community. Even things like Firefox which is one of the grand champions of open source only got 25% market share, the old ways sit hard.

Microsoft won't budge but the other companies, they're just looking for a business case and you'll have Adobe CS - the real thin

There's many, many people that need only basic software, but they're also the kind of user you can't require a degree in CS to administrate their box - those groups are almost mutually exclusive.

Ubuntu really isn't hard to set up or keep running. I would say that it's no harder to Install than Windows, and in many cases you have a greater likelihood that all of your hardware will be identified without need of additional drivers. At least that's been my experience, which is why I suggest that the problem now is less about the OS and more about the applications.

I've thought for some time that the biggest threat to Microsoft would be if Adobe released their own Linux distribution which their Creati

Your post boils down to the usual complaint that application XYZ isn't available on Linux.

I don't see why that anyone should be dismissive about this "usual complaint". People here on Slashdot often misunderstand the complaint and get defensive. The complaint isn't " application XYZ isn't available on Linux," but rather "there isn't an application on Linux that lets me do task ABC as quickly and easily as I can using application XYZ on Windows." If it's true, then it's a valid complaint.

But that's not what my post was about. I wouldn't even say my post was a complaint. I asserted my belief

Has Ubuntu Server considered directly challenging Red Hat through competitive marketing? Is RHEL seen as a direct competitor with Ubuntu? I know Ubuntu Server has put a lot of work into being a cloud computing platform; has any extensive thought gone into more explicitly targeting traditional Linux server/RHEL deployments as they are seen now (Java application server stack, web stack, etc.?)

We're seeing more and more vendors trying to target their OS not only to specific devices, but to very specific components (vid cards, resolutions, network cards...), following in Apple's footsteps. What percentage of dev time does Canonical spend on driver and config support ? Do you think it makes sense for the 'official' distros to alleviate the burden at the cost of some users no longer getting official support ?

Matt, you were intensely criticized by members of the Free Software community for your critical stance facing "vague concepts" like software freedom and "no vendor lock-in." Reading your blog, it seems to me like you are still a fan of focusing on "high quality software at a compelling price" rather than these other concepts. How will this position affect your work with Canonical and more specifically, its relationship with freedom-first software advocates?

Second. I have to second that this question be asked. Matt seems to want to stay away from the ethical side of free software and just focus on the new hotness factor of "open source". It's kind of funny because I would hear about his posts since he generally included the exact phrase "free software" but when I would read his posts, there was nothing behind it so it seemed like keyword stuffing.

I'm not all that surprised but I am saddened that Canonical who claims to have a "free operating system for your

Saddened is a good word for it. I thought it was sort of awkwardly incongruent when Canonical rolled out Ubuntu One. They could have made their entry so much more unique by positioning it with respect to some of the core values that free software rides on. That's the sort of creativity they'll need in order to compete with the likes of Dropbox, unless they intend to lock down the entire Ubuntu platform at some point.

I guess we haven't learned our collective lesson about software freedom when there's a Clo

You might be interested in my podcast in the latest ep of which we talk about a fifth freedom [trygnulinux.com]...freedom of data access and user mobility(i.e. not to be locked in to a network/Cloud service). I've been meaning to write something more on this.

What are Canonical's plans for mobile platforms? With Maemo, another Debian based distro, now available for smartphones, would Canonical also get involved with either that or maybe develop a completely new Distro?

With the desktop Linux market being extremely small and server markets being dominated by Red Hat and Novell, mobiles probably are the sweet spot for Canonical, with its strong focus on usability. Additionally, the lack of standardisation means that users are more willing to experiement with interfaces. So what is the relative priority of Mobile, Netbook, Desktop and Server platform in Canonical's roadmap?

>(Disclaimer: Matt is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet.)Revealing the interests of parties involved is good journalism. But unless the author feels this means they consequently have no obligation to objectivity or accuracy, it isn't a disclaimer - it's a disclosure.

Alfresco takes what is essentially an unstable snapshot of the publicly available and GPL'd Community Edition, branches it into a private source repository, stabilizes that private codebase, and makes stable point releases of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition from that. Sure, fixes from Enterprise Edition are eventually rolled back into the unstable Community Edition trunk, but there is never a stable point release made for the GPL licensed Community Edition. So, if our company wants open sourc

I have a question about the results of asking a question. I administer a few Ubuntu VMs and I want to simply turn off screen blanking (please note I didn't say anything about running X). How does one simply turn off screen blanking with regards to the standard text login window? Note that setenv and friends aren't the answer because I want screen blanking off always, not just when someone is logged in.

But this isn't about that question specifically. While I still want the question to be answered, what

Seriously, what were you guys thinking? The Great Pumpkin only comes once a year.

Everyone made fun of XP and the Fisher-Price theme... but Ubuntu is worse. It looks like it was thrown together by a bunch of Hallowe'enies.

"Oh, but it's earth colors, like autumn!" Sure, pick the time of year when everything DIES! That sends a great subliminal "use-me-be-happy" message.

Fall colors - remind people that Old Man Winter is right around the corner, it's only going to get worse for the rest of the year, slush and ice and heating bills and salt stains on your boots and coat and clothes and the dogs dragging dirt in from the freshly sanded sidewalks all over the comforter and ice storms and dead cats frozen in snowbanks flying through the air as the municipal snowblower sucks them up and... you get the picture.

You want companies to take you seriously, you don't have your reps wear a bow tie so they don't look like Bozo the Clown, and you don't make your prime product offering look like the artwork from a pumpkin pie box.

If you have to do a pie-themed color scheme, order a pizza pie and use that for inspiration. Everyone likes pizza. Or do apple pie - American Pie! Even the Band Campers can relate to that! Or cherry pie. There are so many nerds in basements who dream of cherry...

It's not just ugly - it's fugly-ugly. Even in Soviet Russia.

It is ugly on the screen. It's so ugly it's obscene.
It is ugly every day. It is ugly like old whey.
It is ugly on a boat. It is ugly with a goat.
It is ugly like brown turd. It is ugly as a nerd.
It is ugly, don't you see? It is ugly like green pee.
It is ugly, all the way. It is ugly, Matt Assay!
I will not use it on a boat. I will not use it with a goat.
I will not use it at the fair. I will not use it in my hair.
I will leave it with the nerds. They like it colored like brown turds.
I will leave it, Matt Assay, It makes my eyeballs bleed all day.

In summary, you only get one chance to make a good first impression, and that color scheme works great - for your competitors.

I'm a fan of Linux in general and Ubuntu in specific....and I don't think of myself as an idiot. I'm even fairly tech savvy - I'm a full-time software developer.

And yet, even after two weeks of really, really trying to get Ubuntu running on my desktop - it wouldn't install. I had a 2-3 page thread on the Ubuntu forums detailing my problem and everything I'd done to fix it. Eventually, people stopped offering suggestions.

So, yeah, maybe he's an idiot. And maybe I'm an idiot too. And maybe a

While all of the problems you describe are true, It doesn't really explain why anything other than a Mac is popular, because the problems in windows are, overall, worse.

Linux has lots of problems with hardware, but it also has fewer problems than windows. Windows has a few specific pain points covered better than Linux, but upper management at microsoft complained about the horrible driver support for Vista.

The list of pain points in Linux are becoming well known, and well defined problems, which is probabl

Except there's an actual case to be made that the OP is an idiot, as much of what he considers problematic is hopelessly outdated, even in Windows. RealPlayer? Nesticle? Does Netscape even run a dial-up ISP anymore? Gaming in 640x480? This sounds like a rehashed troll post from 1996, and despite his tacked-on claims to the contrary it should be treated as such.

>>>what he considers problematic is hopelessly outdated, even in Windows. RealPlayer? Nesticle? Does Netscape even run a dial-up ISP anymore? Gaming in 640x480?>>>

NESticle == NES emulator. Surely I'm not the only one into classic gaming.640x480 == Again, classic gaming.RealPlayer == Needed to view various videos at tvpc.comDialup == Needed for use in hotels without highspeed connections. And so on. These aren't outdated problems, but things I've encountered in just the past month.

I will give you the Dialup and the low resolution, at least provisionally, but if a site requires RealPlayer in this day and age its owners should be shot. Also, NESticle was outpaced years ago by FCE Ultra. Even Mednafen is more compatible. Both make NESticle look quite terrible.

It may not be a troll but it's a sign of not knowing what you're doing. Hell, one of the first things I did when properly moving over to Linux was install Opera on Ubuntu. I don't think the process could have been any easier.

You'll need to speak to the developers of Nesticle and Stella as to why their ports may be interior.

System ->Adminitration -> System monitor will give you all sorts of stats on your CPU, memory, processes running, etc.

you're not stuck, although that does sound like bad design. Fortunately, Gnome has a solution to the general problem of poorly sized dialog boxes going off the screen for whatever reason. Hold the [alt] key and click anywhere in the window and drag. Which is a far sight better than what Apple has chosen to do with windows that go off screen: Resize automatically sometimes, only allow moving windows from the thin strip at the top, and only allow resizing windows with a small tab on a single corner.

Considering the number of applications that use a managed/dynamic runtime. Including perl, python, ruby and others, I'd say that including said runtimes is probably better in terms of application support out of the box, over a particular application.

I heard they were making a big switch to mud brown in the next edition. As for looking like a desert wasteland, it also looks like the inside of every trendy coffee shop and Panera Bread, so you know a lot of thought went into its innovation. In fact, that's the very measure of original-ness: is it found in thousands of trendy stores nationwide? Then it's originique!

Mono is integrating into more and more Gnome apps. Given that Ubuntu is based upon Gnome, either they must start forking these Gnome apps, or embrace Mono themselves.

I understand the initial concern with Mono, but I'm not paranoid about patent lawsuits.

I don't know that Microsoft can really sue over Mono given that Microsoft has worked with the Mono team and largely given their blessing to the project. The EU has also demanded they work on interoperability. If Microsoft tried to sue over Mono patent-infring

I haven't read every license discussion and I'm not a lawyer, but if Debian has found it legally safe to keep Mono, then I don't see how it is truly dangerous in any way./thread, lest we get into a Monowar.